Every September, the same question starts circulating around Saugeen Shores: who’s actually playing this year?
For 2026, the Canadian Big Band Celebration has answered with one of its deepest rosters yet, stacking a full weekend of swing, jazz, blues, and gypsy-jazz across two lakeside towns.
Headlining the Saturday dances is the Toronto All-Star Big Band, a teenage-and-twenty-something horn section that has shared stages with the likes of Doc Severinsen and Oliver Jones, joined by Kincardine’s own 18-piece Lighthouse Swing Band and the high-energy Stardust Big Band. Add The Lulu’s Band with the Men in Black Hornline, a seven-act Friday night blues and jazz passport crawl through downtown Port Elgin, and a Sunday brunch set from gypsy-swing act Django and Beyond, and you’ve got a genuinely packed bill.
Here’s a closer look at who’s on stage, where to catch them, and why this year’s lineup is worth planning your weekend around.
Friday Night Blues & Jazz
Howlin’ Dog Vintage Jazz Band: Bruce County’s Six-Piece Answer to New Orleans, By Way of Kincardine
Howlin’ Dog Vintage Jazz Band has spent more than two decades doing exactly what its mission statement promises: keeping vintage jazz alive along the Lake Huron shoreline. Formed in Kincardine in 2002 under the direction of Dave Schmalz, the six-piece plays a set list built from New Orleans Dixieland, blues, and swing standards, the kind of hot, horn-forward jazz that used to fill the dance pavilions this whole stretch of coastline was once known for. The current lineup pairs Paul Dearlove on trombone and vocals and Al Mullin on trumpet with Steve Hasbury on clarinet, Karen Weber on bass and vocals, Ian Burbidge on keys, and Mike Smith on drums, a configuration that gives the band room to swing between a tight front-line horn arrangement and a full rhythm section without missing a beat. That range has kept the band booked everywhere from Kincardine’s “4 O’Clock in the Park” summer concert series and the patio at Goderich’s Park House Restaurant to blues jam nights at The Bruce Kincardine, a taproom set at Stone House Brewery, and, in one of the more unlikely bookings for a Dixieland outfit, a Pentecost service at Kincardine United Church. It’s also a lineup with its own internal overlap worth noting: Al Mullin doubles as the leader of the Lighthouse Swing Band, one of Saturday’s headline acts at this year’s Canadian Big Band Celebration, meaning the same horn player bridges both the festival’s scrappy Friday night jazz crawl and its full-scale big-band main event. Howlin’ Dog kicks off the Friday Night Blues & Jazz Passport at RCL Branch 340 in Port Elgin at 7:00 p.m., the kind of hot-jazz warm-up their two-decade run has made them a natural fit for.
Waterstreet Blues Band: Cambridge’s Modern Blues Outfit Bringing a Little Louisiana Spice to Port Elgin
Waterstreet Blues Band built its reputation on a sound that critics have called a genuinely fresh take on the blues, a mix of rockin’ party groove, swing, and Louisiana seasoning that owes as much to a Cajun dance hall as it does to a roadhouse bar band. The Cambridge, Ontario group pairs Rob Deyman’s guitars with the dual-lead-vocal setup of Silvia Dee, who splits her time between vocals, keys, and blues-and-Cajun accordion, and Paul Sapounzi, who handles lead vocals and bass, while Jonny Sauder’s drums and Chris “Junior” Malleck’s harmonica round out a rhythm section built for dancing rather than sitting still. That accordion is doing more work than it might in a typical blues five-piece, giving the band’s slide-guitar-driven songs a distinct swamp-boil edge that separates them from a more standard electric-blues bar band. The band has translated that sound into two independently released, critically reviewed albums, most recently “Talkin About,” which drew praise in Blues Blast Magazine for the cool detachment of Dee’s vocal delivery on tracks like the Samantha Fish cover “Miles to Go.” Waterstreet has carried that record across a genuine festival circuit, including the Kitchener Blues Festival, the Canal Bank Shuffle, the West Coast Blues Festival, and Kincardine’s own Lighthouse Blues Festival, a Bruce County stop that puts them just down the shoreline from the Canadian Big Band Celebration’s home turf. Along the way, members have shared stages with blues and rock veterans including Randy Bachman, Marcia Ball, and Mel Brown, credentials that show up in the band’s tight, road-tested chemistry rather than in any single flashy moment. Waterstreet Blues Band plays Queen’s Bar and Grill in Port Elgin at 7:00 p.m. as part of the Friday Night Blues & Jazz Passport, bringing that same rockin’, accordion-laced groove to one of the crawl’s four downtown stops.
Patrick Dunning Blues Band: The Saugeen Shores Guitarist Whose Open Mic Nights Built a Local Institution
Patrick Dunning has spent years earning his reputation the old-fashioned way: showing up, week after week, as a guitarist, singer, and bandleader working the rooms of his own hometown. Based right in Saugeen Shores, Dunning is a fixture of the local scene, hosting open mic night at Queen’s Bar and Grill in Port Elgin every Tuesday and running the Thursday Night Blues Jam over at The Bruce in Kincardine, the kind of steady, community-building residencies that tend to produce exactly the tight, well-drilled bar band he leads today. For 2026, that band is rounded out by Steve Warner Morgan on piano, Ray Thaw on bass, and Steve Metcalfe on drums, a rhythm section built for the kind of guitar-forward, crowd-pleasing blues that keeps a Tuesday night open mic packed. Dunning is no stranger to the Canadian Big Band Celebration stage. He first appeared on the festival’s Friday night bill back in 2022 as the Patrick Dunning Blues Machine at Wismer House, and returned in 2025 leading the Patrick Dunning Band at Queen’s Bar and Grill, making 2026 at least his third run through the festival’s Friday Night Blues & Jazz Passport. That kind of recurring booking says as much about the band as any press clipping could: a festival built on decades of institutional memory keeps calling back the acts that know how to work a room. Patrick Dunning Blues Band takes the stage at Queen’s Bar and Grill at 7:00 p.m., delivering the same guitar-driven, homegrown blues that’s made Dunning’s own bar nights a Saugeen Shores staple.
Joe Huron Trio featuring Lisa Hutchinson: The Barrie Guitarist Who Turned Sunday Afternoons Into a Standing Jazz Residency
Joe Huron has been called a quiet force on the Canadian jazz scene for well over 25 years, and the description fits a guitarist who built his reputation less through flash than through sheer consistency. Born in Arnprior and trained at Malaspina College and York University, Huron has anchored a nearly unbroken Sunday afternoon residency in downtown Barrie since 2004, first at Sticky Fingers and, for years since, at the British Arms Pub, working through jazz standards like “Body and Soul” and “Stella by Starlight” alongside his own compositions. That songwriting side surfaced fully on 2017’s “Finally,” an album of originals including “Derail,” “The Void,” and “Blues for Paul” that gave a more permanent home to material the trio had likely been road-testing on stage for years. Huron’s regular Sunday lineup has always rotated around a stable core, pairing him with drummer Tim Moore and a revolving cast of bassists that has included Jason Turner, Peter Telford, and Neil Numminen, a flexible setup that’s kept the residency fresh for two decades without ever losing its identity. He also runs The Joe Huron Music Space, teaching guitar to students of every age and genre, which tracks for a musician whose own career reads like a two-decade lesson in showing up and doing the work. For the Canadian Big Band Celebration, the trio expands to a quartet, with vocalist Lisa Hutchinson taking the lead alongside Huron on guitar, Peter Loudon on bass, and longtime collaborator Tim Moore on drums. The Joe Huron Trio featuring Lisa Hutchinson plays The Wismer House at 7:00 p.m., bringing that same steady, standards-driven jazz to the Friday Night Blues & Jazz Passport crawl.
The Greg Ritchie Band: Saugeen Shores Blues That Made It to the Semis in Memphis
The Greg Ritchie Band plays exactly the kind of blues its home turf would suggest, drawing from the shoreline communities of Saugeen First Nation #29 and Port Elgin to build a sound that runs through gospel roots, Jimi Hendrix, and Creedence Clearwater Revival in the same set. Frontman Greg Ritchie handles guitar and vocals with a résumé that includes opening for David Wilcox and playing international festival stages, backed by Adrian Mitchell on bass and Mike Campbell on drums, a trio lineup that leaves plenty of room for Ritchie’s guitar work to carry the band’s high-energy live reputation. That energy isn’t just local reputation talking, either: the band reached the semi-finals of the International Blues Challenge in Memphis, Tennessee in January 2024, a genuinely competitive benchmark that puts a Lake Huron shoreline band on the same stage as blues acts from across North America. That Memphis run has translated into a steady circuit of festival and concert-hall bookings back home, including a Ribfest X appearance, a headlining night at Heartwood Hall, and stops at rooms like the Harbour Street Fish Bar and Hanover’s WOW Wing House, all built around original material like “Just Another Fool” and “Born With The Blues.” It’s the kind of trajectory that tends to follow a band once a big regional or international showcase validates what local crowds already knew, and it puts the Greg Ritchie Band in good company on a Canadian Big Band Celebration bill built around exactly that mix of homegrown talent and real credentials. The Greg Ritchie Band takes the stage at The Wismer House at 9:00 p.m., closing out the venue’s night with the same gospel-tinged, guitar-driven blues that carried them to Memphis.
Stevie Vallance Jazz Trio: The Emmy-Winning Voice Director Bringing Jazz Standards to Wild Wing
Stevie Vallance is not your typical jazz-trio frontwoman: alongside a decades-long career singing jazz and blues standards, she’s also an Emmy Award-winning voice director, the kind of dual résumé that shows up in how comfortably she commands a room. Her recording career dates back to 1998’s “Practically Naked,” her debut jazz album, and she’s spent the years since fronting the Charlie Bell Trio through the Thornbury and Kincardine jazz festivals and headlining the Medicine Hat Jazz Festival in Alberta in both 2008 and 2009. That range, moving between festival main stages and more intimate lounge sets, has made her a regular presence on the Ontario jazz circuit, including recent dates at Loft 1020 in Port Elgin backed by her dynamic trio. For the Canadian Big Band Celebration, that trio pairs Vallance’s vocals with John McLelland on keyboard and Greg Pryor on double bass, a stripped-down configuration built to keep the focus squarely on her phrasing and song selection rather than instrumental flash. It’s a lineup well-suited to the kind of jazz-soirée sets she’s built her reputation on, working through standards with the easy confidence of someone who has spent decades reading a room, whether that room is a Kincardine jazz club or a Los Angeles voice-over booth. Stevie Vallance Jazz Trio plays Wild Wing Bar & BBQ at 7:00 p.m. as part of the Friday Night Blues & Jazz Passport, giving passport holders one of the night’s more polished, festival-tested sets to build their evening around.
Robin Banks: The Canadian Vocalist Who Made Dallas Blues Her Second Home
Miss Robin Banks has spent more than three decades building a voice that moves fluidly between blues, R&B, soul, Americana, and jazz, shaped by real mileage on the road. Raised on a small tobacco farm 50 miles east of Detroit, she found her footing in Toronto in the 1980s, driving a taxi to fund her earliest gigs. By 1992 she’d formed her own blues band near Windsor, Ontario, mentored by veterans George “Wild Child” Butler and Alford “Chicago Pete” Harrell. Her 1997 debut, Permanent Record, and a Maple Blues Award for New Artist of the Year led to Memphis’s International Blues Talent Competition and, in 1999, a move to Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, where she spent seven years on the circuit and forged a close friendship with singer/harmonica legend Sam Myers. A stint in Jamaica followed, working alongside musicians tied to Bob Marley’s band, before she resettled in Canada in 2009. Her 2014 album Modern Classic, cut with Duke Robillard and keyboardist Bruce Bears, drew praise in Blues Blast Magazine, with Robillard calling her “a major force in roots music.” Her newest release, Lost in Austin, produced with Dallas Blues Society Records founder Chuck Nevitt and longtime collaborators the Moeller Brothers and Drew Allain, is climbing blues radio charts internationally. A songwriter, producer, and bandleader compared to Etta James and Dinah Washington, she’ll bring these songs to the Canadian Big Band Celebration with guitarist Shawn Kellerman, and to Wild Wing Bar & BBQ for the Friday Night Blues & Jazz Passport.
More info: www.missrobinbanks.com
Friday Night Jazz Club
Southampton Jazz Club: The Year-Round Concert Series Bringing an Eight-Piece Swing Band to Hampton Hall
Southampton Jazz Club usually operates as a standing invitation rather than a fixed act, running its own “Jazz Night” series at the Southampton Golf & Country Club’s Hampton Hall throughout the year and bringing in a rotating cast of prominent Canadian jazz and blues musicians for a genuinely loyal local following. For its Canadian Big Band Celebration slot, though, the series scales up well past its usual small-combo format, presenting the Jump Jive Gents, an eight-piece band built for exactly the kind of horn-driven, dance-friendly swing the festival was founded to celebrate. The lineup pairs saxophonist Charlie Bell, a name long associated with the Southampton Golf & CC’s jazz nights through his own Charlie Bell Trio, with Matt Bell on trumpet, Don Buchanan on keyboard, and Vern Dorge on baritone sax, giving the band a full three-horn front line to work with. Behind that horn section sits Mike MacDonald on guitar and vocals, Jack McFadden on double bass, Tyler Pantlin on harp and vocals, and Steve Wood on drums, rounded out by guest vocalists Susan Dietrich and Greg Nicholson sharing the frontline duties. It’s worth noting that both McFadden and Wood are doing double duty across the festival weekend, also anchoring the rhythm section behind the Robin Banks Jazz & Blues Quartet on Friday night, exactly the kind of musician overlap that tends to surface once you look closely at a scene this small and this tightly connected. Southampton Jazz Club and the Jump Jive Gents take the Hampton Hall stage as part of the $25 Friday Night Jazz Club ticket, sharing the bill with the Super Blue Sextet and the Classic Jazz Jam.
Super Blue: The Donnybrook Trio’s Tribute to Freddie Hubbard’s Most Underrated Session
Super Blue takes its name directly from Freddie Hubbard’s 1978 Columbia album of the same name, a record that reunited the trumpet legend with heavyweight collaborators like Joe Henderson, Hubert Laws, and Kenny Barron and climbed to No. 6 on the Billboard charts despite being largely overlooked in jazz circles since. Built around The Donnybrook Trio, this ensemble expands that core group, keyboardist Jeff McLeod, guitarist Ben Bishop, and drummer Morgan Childs, into a quintet by adding Steve McDade on trumpet and Vern Dorge on saxophone, the two horns needed to actually reproduce the interplay that made Hubbard’s original recording work. It’s a deliberately ambitious undertaking: rather than sampling a few familiar Hubbard tunes, the group is built specifically around recreating the sound and feel of a single, fairly obscure late-70s session, which says something about how seriously this lineup takes the material. That specificity also connects Super Blue to the rest of the festival’s Friday night bill in a small-world way worth noting: saxophonist Vern Dorge pulls double duty across the evening, also anchoring the horn section for the Jump Jive Gents earlier in the night, the kind of overlap that tends to happen once you look closely at how few working horn players a scene this size actually has. Super Blue takes the Hampton Hall stage at 8:30 p.m. as part of the Friday Night Jazz Club, giving festival-goers a rare chance to hear Freddie Hubbard’s “Super Blue” title track and its surrounding material performed live and in full by musicians clearly steeped in its details.
Classic Jazz Jam: When Every Horn Player From the Night Combines for One Last Set
Classic Jazz Jam closes out the Friday Night Jazz Club the way the best late-night sets always do: by pulling nearly every musician who played Hampton Hall earlier in the evening back onto one stage. The core rhythm section comes from The Donnybrook Trio, Jeff McLeod on keys, Ben Bishop on guitar, and Morgan Childs on drums, the same engine room that anchored Super Blue’s Freddie Hubbard tribute set two hours earlier. Joining them are trumpeters Steve McDade and Matt Bell alongside saxophonists Vern Dorge, Charlie Bell, and Don Buchanan, effectively combining Super Blue’s horn section with the front line from the Jump Jive Gents into a single, genuinely stacked front line for one closing hour. For a festival built on honoring the improvisational, bandstand-swapping culture of the old Great Lakes dance pavilions, where sitting in with whoever was on stage was half the fun, a set like this is about as authentic a nod to that history as the modern festival gets. Classic Jazz Jam takes the Hampton Hall stage at 10:00 p.m., closing out the Friday Night Jazz Club with the same musicians who built the night’s earlier sets, now cut loose together for one last hour of standards.
Saturday Afternoon Big Dance
The Lulu’s Band With The Men In Black Hornline: Kitchener’s Legendary Roadhouse Sound, Reborn on a Port Elgin Dance Floor
The Lulu’s Band takes its name, and its spirit, directly from Lulu’s Roadhouse, the legendary Kitchener, Ontario venue that for decades hosted Canadian icons like Kim Mitchell, David Wilcox, Trooper, and Colin James alongside touring international acts before its doors eventually closed. Rather than let that era fade quietly, the band built a set list around the classic rock, R&B, and kicking country that once filled that Kitchener roadhouse, and has spent years pairing that sound with the Men in Black Hornline, a horn section that has served as Lulu’s backup line long enough to become inseparable from the act itself. Together they specialize in punching up 60s-through-80s staples from artists like Chicago, Santana, Midnight Oil, and the Downchild Blues Band, giving familiar classic-rock radio hits the kind of horn-driven muscle a four-piece band alone could never deliver. The pairing has a real history with the Canadian Big Band Celebration specifically: the festival committee first brought Lulu’s and the Men in Black together for the Saturday Big Event back in 2011, a booking that reportedly turned into a “resounding success,” with an overflowing dance floor of baby boomers reliving the music of their youth. That single show effectively locked in the template the festival still uses today, expanding its scope beyond pure swing-era jazz into the classic rock and R&B that defined later decades of the same dance-hall tradition. Now considered an all-time local favourite in Saugeen Shores, The Lulu’s Band with the Men in Black Hornline returns to open the Saturday Afternoon Big Dance Event at Lakeshore Recreation, doors at 1:00 p.m. and music starting at 1:30, giving the $30 afternoon ticket its full-throttle, horn-backed classic rock energy.
Saturday Evening Big Dance
Toronto All-Star Big Band: The Teenage Powerhouse Marking 30 Years of Reviving the Swing Era
The Toronto All-Star Big Band has spent three decades proving that swing-era big band music doesn’t need musicians who actually lived through the swing era to sound authentic. Based out of Etobicoke and drawing what one reviewer called “cream-of-the-crop” young talent from across the GTA, the 17-piece ensemble is built almost entirely from musicians between the ages of 16 and 22, many of them university students already pursuing music degrees, put through a genuinely rigorous regimen of rehearsals and workshops before ever touching a stage. That structure has made 2026 a milestone year for the group: they’re marking their 30th anniversary with a program built around what would have been Tony Bennett’s 100th birthday, a fitting way to celebrate three decades spent keeping the same golden-age repertoire alive for new audiences. That anniversary caps a touring history that has taken the band well beyond typical community-band bookings, with regular stops at Toronto’s historic Old Mill and Casa Loma, appearances at the Beaches International Jazz Festival and the Festival of the Sound, and a run at the Glenn Miller Festival in Clarinda, Iowa, one of the most direct pilgrimages a swing band can make. Alumni and collaborators have shared stages with jazz legends including Doc Severinsen, Clark Terry, and Oliver Jones, a level of credibility that’s rare for a band whose lineup fully turns over every few years as members age out and new players audition in. That the group can maintain a signature sound across constant personnel change says as much about its training pipeline as it does about the material itself. The Toronto All-Star Big Band headlines part of Saturday’s Big Dance Event at Lakeshore Recreation, bringing a genuinely rare pairing to the Canadian Big Band Celebration: a festival marking over three decades of preserving big band heritage, sharing the bill with a band marking the exact same milestone in keeping that music performed live.
Lighthouse Swing Band: The 18-Piece Kincardine Institution Keeping Ontario’s Big Bands Alive
Lighthouse Swing Band has been dedicated to live music since 1984, and more than four decades later, it has earned a distinction few Ontario ensembles can claim: a 2023 profile in the Owen Sound Sun-Times, written as the band marked its 40th year, called it one of the last remaining regularly performing big bands left in the province. Based out of Kincardine and fielding a genuinely full 18-piece lineup, the band has built its entire mission around preserving swing and big band music at a scale most modern acts simply don’t attempt anymore, performing everything from formal swing dances and concert-series dates to private event entertainment across Bruce County. That longevity puts the band in a small, shrinking category of big bands still doing this work with a full horn and rhythm section rather than a scaled-down tribute act. The band’s local roots run deep, with regular appearances at community staples like Kincardine’s summer concert series and Southampton’s Fairy Lake, the kind of hometown bookings that have kept it embedded in the exact Bruce County music scene the Canadian Big Band Celebration was built to celebrate. It’s also directed by Al Mullin, who pulls double duty across the festival weekend on cornet and trumpet with the Howlin’ Dog Vintage Jazz Band, one more thread in a shoreline jazz and swing scene where the same handful of dedicated musicians keep multiple traditions running at once. Lighthouse Swing Band takes the stage as part of Saturday’s Big Dance Event at Lakeshore Recreation, sharing the bill with the Toronto All-Star Big Band and the Stardust Big Band in what amounts to a rare, full-scale big-band triple bill.
Stardust Big Band: The House Band That Rebuilt Itself to Keep the Festival’s Original Mission Alive
Stardust Big Band closes out Saturday night at the Canadian Big Band Celebration, and its story only really makes sense against what came before it. For the festival’s first 25 years, a local Stardust Big Band served as the CBBC’s original host band, before playing what was billed as its final gig in Thornbury in April of 2011. Rather than let that core dance-band tradition disappear along with it, the festival committee assembled a new ensemble that same year, drawing on some of the finest jazz and big band instrumentalists in Canada to keep the Great Lakes dance-hall repertoire going, updated with the kind of contemporary big-band arrangements popularized by Michael Bublé, Diana Krall, and Paul Anka. That rebuilt lineup has spent the years since bringing in a genuinely notable run of guest vocalists, including Carol Welshman and Heather Bambrick alongside homegrown talent like Rebecca Binnendyk and Ethan Salmon, with past editions even featuring a local ensemble performing an Andrews Sisters tribute set. It’s a structure that mirrors the festival’s own resilience: rather than freezing a single band’s lineup in place indefinitely, the CBBC committee rebuilt around the tradition itself once the original band’s run ended, and the result is a Saturday night headliner still carrying the Stardust name more than a decade later.
Sunday Jazz Brunch
Django and Beyond: Toronto’s Gypsy-Swing Scene Brings 1930s Paris to Sunday Brunch
Django and Beyond works in a genre small enough that its lineage is easy to trace: jazz manouche, or “hot club jazz,” the gypsy-swing sound Django Reinhardt and violinist Stéphane Grappelli invented in 1930s Paris fronting the Quintette du Hot Club de France. That same Toronto scene traces back to 1995, when a group of Reinhardt devotees started playing together purely for the joy of it before eventually turning it into the city’s longest-running gypsy-swing act, a lineage Django and Beyond draws directly from in both repertoire and spirit. The “Beyond” in the name is doing real work, too: the act’s own billing points past Reinhardt himself toward guitarists like Charlie Christian, Mike Bloomfield, and Danny Gatton, stretching the set list from 1930s Paris toward the blues-rock guitar tradition that followed it. That’s a meaningful distinction for a genre that can otherwise calcify into pure repertory playing, and it’s part of why acoustic gypsy-swing acts like this one have built such a durable niche on the Toronto scene, one built on genuine musicianship rather than novelty. It’s also a natural fit for the Canadian Big Band Celebration’s closing event: after two days of horn sections and dance floors, Sunday morning calls for something quieter, and a violin-and-guitar-driven set built on 90-year-old French jazz standards delivers exactly that shift in register. Django and Beyond performs at the Sunday Jazz Brunch in Hampton Hall starting at 11:00 a.m., paired with a brunch from Tim and Sarah’s Catering, sending festival-goers home with the same warm, string-driven swing that once defined a smoky Paris nightclub nearly a century ago.
Get Your Tickets Today to the Canadian Big Band Celebration Music Festival!
Add it all up, and the 2026 lineup for the Canadian Big Band Celebration captures exactly what has kept this festival going strong for over three decades: a deliberate mix of full-scale touring big bands, tight jazz combos, and genre specialists that no single stage could hold on its own.
Whether you’re drawn in by the Toronto All-Star Big Band’s swing-era horn charts, the Lighthouse Swing Band’s hometown pedigree, or the gypsy-jazz warmth of Django and Beyond closing out Sunday brunch, there’s a set on this bill built for nearly every taste in vintage popular music.
With acts spread across Port Elgin and Southampton and tickets sold individually or as a full weekend pass, the smartest move is deciding early which nights matter most to you.
Given how quickly the Saturday dances tend to fill the floor, this is one lineup worth locking in tickets for well before the September weekend arrives.
